Tim Brown is the owner of Hook Agency, and strategic marketer focused primarily on driving traffic and leads for small businesses and construction companies.

These ideas for Marketing Financial Services, and marketing financial advisors – were curated for the sole purpose of getting you more ideal clients!

I’ve reached out to brilliant marketing automation specialists, e-mail marketers, content marketers and web designers who help financial companies every day and picked the top ideas so that you can break through to your next rush of leads, business and prosperity. Here are the tips!

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Show some personality – offer something with a clearer niche and a more unique value proposition

Selecting a financial advisor or company is a big decision and one that is generally based upon trust and reliability. Unfortunately, the industry is renowned for dry, generic marketing and very little personality.

This makes the financial sector ideal for someone willing to take a thought leadership role and display some personality. Put a face to the name and offer some forthright opinions in the form of a blog, regular newsletter or even a short vlog.

People relate to people, not companies, so it’s important to tell your story and make sure it relates to your target market in a way that relay resonates.

My agency used this strategy with a retirement fund that had an unclear target market, no brand voice and declining membership. We repositioned them as the small business fund and helped them generate content that spoke directly to small business owners in language they understood. The result has been a 42% increase in new members since the campaign commenced.

Utilize Facebook ads with Content That Showcases Real People on Your Team

Social is an amazing way to give a face to your brand – especially if you showcase your team members on a regular basis. Do a QA with 1 of your relationship managers – and ask questions that your new clients often ask. Once you create amazing content, use Facebook’s ad platform to promote the post – with Facebook ads you can target to a net worth, job titles, household income and age.

Use Content Marketing to Showcase How You Work – and Educate Prospects

We need to be honest with ourselves: Despite all the spilled ink on “special sauces” and magic algorithms, you compete against financial service providers who offer very similar services. Therefore, in your content, I’d advise that you spend less time talking about what you do, and invest more effort demonstrating how you work.

Your marketing content should serve as your virtual representative; consuming your content should give potential customers a sense of what it’s like to work with you. Will you be attentive, diligent, and respectful – or imperious, self-important, and self-serving? Use your marketing materials as a tool that encourages prospects to believe that working with you will be a rewarding experience.

Use Trigger campaigns to act on Interest

Especially in Financial Services Marketing, a consultative selling approach is a smart business move. You are helping people buy, instead of selling too soon, too hard. Good marketing automation software, lets you act on the clicks or downloads of (gated) content that show when a person is particularly interested and trigger a multiple automated emails on the topic. The added benefit is that they see you as a trusted advisor and the whole automation runs without any work, once set up.

You know there are ways to get social and stay compliant. Hiding behind the regulations just says your lazy, you don’t understand the power of the internet, or you aren’t watching what your competition is doing to generate revenue via digital marketing. So, my best advice is to develop your own strategy that coincides with your brand values and just click the damn button!

Study your Fintech competitors

In the media it seems there are two kinds of financial companies: fintech and traditional. Traditional financial services have mountains of data and pre- won trust, whilst the fintech revolutionnaires are building products with one main goal in mind: to make lives easier.

We need to stop putting things in boxes and instead adopt a pick n mix style of marketing approach. As a traditional financial services marketer, you’d be a fool to ignore the brilliant ways fintech companies are building media momentum and acquiring users at the speed of light. And fintech entrepreneurs should never underestimate the knowledge and experience that traditional financial services hold.

Properly study your fintech competitors, and build a marketing plan that is the best of both worlds. The digital world is a magical space, and you can do whatever you want to and at a fraction of the price of say print advertising. Create content that makes a difference in people’s lives, build communities on social media, and make receiving a new debit card an experience not just another letter through the letterbox.

Attend a BNI group

Business Network International (BNI) is one of the oldest and most reliable business networking organizations in the world. I have spoken with many professionals that gained the majority of their business from BNI. One financial planner from my old Rotary group told me that his BNI group drove close to 60% of his business. With over 200,000 members around the world, it is easy to see how BNI can help you tap a large group of contacts to reach new customers.

Unfortunately, some people spin their wheels with BNI. I have met one professional that used it unsuccessfully for three years and didn’t get a single referral.

It is important to remember that you get out what you put into BNI. BNI members must provide leads to other members every week to stay in good standing. There are two mistakes that you want to avoid:

Offering tips to the same members every week. This limits the range of influence you have. This may work with others that work more with people in similar professions. Financial professionals need to reach a larger and more generalized audience. Offering leads to as many members as possible helps you expand your influence.

Failing to follow up with people that you offered leads for. This will show that you are genuinely interested in offering valuable leads, which will help you forge stronger connections. They will be more likely to reciprocate after you show a sincere desire to help them.

Providing value to other members with quality leads will really put you ahead and help you thrive as a financial professional in BNI.

Create super in-depth guides to gain online authority

Nothing creates more search engine authority for the long-haul than creating a piece of content that is THE authority on a particular subject. If you have ‘The Ultimate Reference Guide to Changes in the Tax Code’ and you give high-level description and an image for each, and graph key information in shareable images – you increase the likelihood of earning links to your content. The more authoritative your piece, the more in-depth the resource, the more original the research – it drives up your ability to rank for key phrases that are similar to that piece of content across the site, not just on the piece itself. I call this the SEO ‘Osmosis effect’ and I’ve seen it over and over on all kinds of different sites, including financial services. The reason it works is because Google measures ‘time on site’ and ‘bounce rate’, which mean if you can get someone to read about certain topics on your site for 2-3+ minutes – that post and other topics like it on your site are more attractive to Google because it knows its served your website up for topics like that and people have enjoyed the content!

Use simple infographics with financial tips they can implement now + create a series

By creating value to them *at this moment* you can catch people’s interest and allow them a stronger reason to follow you on social media. For instance some fact like “Save 4 dollars a day” from 30 years old on and invest it to retire at 65 – or any useful fact that people can use THAT DAY. This alludes to a broader concept in digital marketing I like to suggest – which is creating a ‘series.’ If you have a rhythm for a series – whether on your blog, on Facebook Live, or even a Twitter poll you do every Thursday – you create a little bit of anticipation for the next one, and ideally become a staple in the audience’s mind.